Fantasy sports leagues are generally of two different types (referred to interchangeably herein as the league “format”). The first type (referred to interchangeably herein as “rotisserie” or “stat-to-stat” style) is premised on each player's cumulative statistics (interchangeably referred to herein as “scores”). The real-life (also interchangeably referred to herein as “actual”) statistics of each player on each fantasy team are compiled over an entire real-life sporting season or a portion thereof. At the end of the cumulative fantasy period, typically an entire season of the actual sport, the statistics for the entire fantasy team are totaled and compared to the cumulative statistics of all of the other fantasy teams in a particular fantasy league.
Typically, multiple statistics are used in this comparison. For example, in baseball a 5×5 rotisserie league may use batting average, steals, home runs, runs, runs batted in, earned run average, saves, walks plus hits per innings pitched, strikeouts, and wins/losses. The fantasy team with the best cumulative statistics typically wins the fantasy season. For example, in a ten-team league, each team is given a point value 1 through 10 for the ranking among other teams in each statistical category, and the total point value among the statistical categories is cumulated and calculated to produce a cumulative score.
One problem with this system is that it is possible for the cumulative statistics of one fantasy team to become so large during the fantasy season that, no matter how well the players on the other fantasy teams perform throughout the remainder of the fantasy season, no other fantasy teams can win. In other words, typically teams that fall behind in the rankings early in a season are unable to make up the lost ground and there is wide variation between the leading fantasy team and the other fantasy team(s). As a result, player interest often falls, and in turn, fantasy leagues witness a drop-off in participation, such as participation in waiver wire or free agent activity, trades, and league chats and postings.
A second type of format is generally referred to herein as “head-to-head” style. In head-to-head style, the fantasy season is broken up into discrete fantasy games (e.g., weekly totals). In other words, the fantasy games are generally scheduled over regular intervals, such as a week of an actual season of the particular sport, for the duration of the season. For example, in professional American football (also referred to herein as “football”), e.g., National Football League (NFL) football, the regular interval typically consists of a 1 week interval, wherein one real game is played per week. In professional baseball, such as Major League Baseball (MLB), the regular interval may consist of a one week period including all games between Monday and the following Sunday, for example.
In head-to-head style, typically a first fantasy team plays, i.e., competes directly with, a second fantasy team (as opposed to the entire league in the rotisserie style). The scores from the first and second fantasy teams are compared, and a winner is determined from the highest statistics of those two teams, regardless of the scores of other teams in the league. In a typical head-to-head format, the head-to-head match ups change in each interval. For example, in a six team league, team 1 plays team 2, team 3 plays team 4, and team 5 plays team 6. The scores of the teams playing one another (i.e., 1 and 2) are compared to determine a winner for the interval, such as a week. The following week team 1 may play team 3 head-to-head.
The statistics of each player on each fantasy team for that interval, e.g., a particular week, are totaled. The cumulated statistics for each player on each fantasy team are then totaled to produce a fantasy team score, and the team's scores are compared to the team scores of the competing fantasy team. The fantasy team with the best team scores is declared the winner of that particular fantasy head-to-head game of that interval. Over the course of a multi-interval season, such as sixteen weeks of the entire NFL season for fantasy football, the best performing fantasy team, i.e., the fantasy team that wins the most fantasy games, is declared the winner of the fantasy league at the end of the fantasy season, or the teams enter a playoff based on regular season records, for example, if there is a tie.
However, one problem with the head-to-head style is that the statistics of some or all of the players on the first fantasy team might be low compared to the statistics of the players on a second competing fantasy team in a particular discrete period, for example, because the players on the first fantasy team may not play as many real-life games during that time interval as the second team. Therefore, the first fantasy team may lose a particular fantasy game even though the players thereon are otherwise better performing players over the course of a season than those on the opposing fantasy team, simply because the competing team's players had a more intensive real-life schedule, e.g., a larger number of real-life games over that particular time interval. The head-to-head format creates artificial and arbitrary delineations in scheduling, and therefore it is often not an accurate measure of a fantasy team's overall value.
Although the head-to-head format provides fantasy players with relatively quick results, as well as frequent results for each defined time interval, the head-to-head format has a tendency to dissipate interest of a fantasy team owner because of the inherent inequalities that tend to exist using artificial fantasy schedules and match ups, which may result in a fantasy team rapidly falling out of contention while still needed to slog through the entire season of the fantasy sport.
Thus, both the head-to-head and rotisserie formats suffer from an inability to keep certain fantasy players' attention. Waning attention in the rotisserie format is largely attributable to the large number of games that the fantasy team owner must monitor over the course of a sport season and throughout the discrete period (i.e., interval) over which the players' statistics are accumulated, while in the head-to-head format, lost interest is typically attributable to the artificial boundaries of the schedule, which can cause unrealistic variations in fantasy performance despite solid performance on the real athletic field.
In view of the above weaknesses inherent in the existing head-to-head and rotisserie formats, there is a need for a fantasy sports system and method of playing thereof to allow for discrete fantasy games or fantasy series that are more representative of the actual players' performance while engaging and retaining the interest of fantasy team owners to utilize managing skills during fantasy play. In addition, there is an unmet need in the art to provide a fantasy sports system that involves a greater amount of knowledge of the real-life sport.